Traditionally, the procurement of many goods (e.g., automobiles, computers, appliances, etc.) and services (legal, financing, medical, insurance, etc.) has been a very labor intensive, time consuming, and costly process. For a consumer to find the best value at the lowest price, meeting all additional relevant criteria of the desired goods and/or services (hereinafter goods), the consumer had to personally contact many providers of the goods and then manually (or mentally) compare pictures of the goods versus the price and other criteria offered by each seller or provider. To compare prices and features of similar goods from different providers was a very difficult task for consumers. For example, definitions were not standardized, prices and other criteria may be fixed for only a short period of time. Providers were also reluctant to provide written prices and inventory often changes rapidly. The entire process may have taken weeks and possibly months, depending on the particular goods. In short, the cost of market information regarding goods was often too expensive to enable consumers to make fully informed decisions when buying goods. The burden of gathering information was simply too great for most consumers and as a result, consumers often made inefficient or incorrect purchasing decisions which did not truly reflect the true desires or requirements of the consumers for the goods.
The process of procuring the goods has been simplified recently by the introduction of product locator services. For example, on the internet, several firms enable customers to receive product and pricing information from multiple sellers based on customer-defined information. The seller information is pre-loaded into a database by a specific service firm (or by the seller) and the consumer is granted access to the array of information.
A drawback of the aforementioned procedure is that the information is static. That is, it does not vary dependent on different conditions. Another drawback to this system is that the information is often old and that sellers are not placed in a rigorous live price market competition for the business of the customer. Furthermore, sellers do not like placing information of their entire inventory (especially if prices are included) in the hands of the public because this could viewed by other sellers. This tends to lower the liquidity and efficiency of the market.
Also it is known where firms forward the names of buyers to participating sellers in a region. These buying services usually have some prearranged discount for the consumers who use the service. These services merely refer individual customers to preselected sellers based on geographic location or other criteria.